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A Buttery Pastry posted:Well, that probably has something to do with it being much easier to create the very basics of a steam engine than a fusion reactor. After the low-hanging fruits have been picked by random people, and then studied by physicists, physicists now have to develop the tools to pick those fruits themselves because we're now operating on a level of complexity and a scale which simply can't be compared to a machine that could probably be fixed by whacking it with a hammer. In that sense, physics is more useful because it's the only tool we have. Would you say then that maybe we're in an age of increasing technological refinement, where the marginal impact of new advances benefits an increasingly smaller few and larger swathes of humanity are left more or less the same? (like yeah it's great that most third world folks have better access to the internet than a reliable food or water supply) This 'low hanging fruit' point could just be reframed as 'we've discovered pretty much everything that makes what we call a modern life comfortable and now we're just making fancier luxury products like curved tvs and smartphones that say bless you when you sneeze'
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Jan 27, 2016 20:37
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computer parts posted:Nope, because the thing about anti-biotic resistance is that it requires many more resources than the normal bacteria. Once the environmental pressures are relieved (i.e., people say "oh poo poo these antibiotics won't work anymore) then the anti-biotic resistant bacteria will be outbred. I was going to post this. What you need is a large enough stable of antibiotics that you can switch to other ones until resistances at your hospital, community, etc go down. Also some antibiotics continue to work forever on some bacteria because there is no easily evolved mechanism of resistance--group A strep are 100% susceptible to standard penicillin, with no exceptions. The problem, again, is money. Antibiotics are not profitable drugs to create--it's a very crowded market. If the government were willing to subsidize antibiotic creation, I'm sure more could be developed.
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Jan 27, 2016 20:42
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Would you say then that maybe we're in an age of increasing technological refinement, where the marginal impact of new advances benefits an increasingly smaller few and larger swathes of humanity are left more or less the same? (like yeah it's great that most third world folks have better access to the internet than a reliable food or water supply)
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Jan 27, 2016 21:11
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The difference of 1870 :: 1940 has to be less noticeable than the difference of "Before Fire" :: "After Fire". Imagine having no form of artifical light or heat, and then, you have. So there's only conclusion: We've been in a technological decline ever since the early stone age,
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Jan 27, 2016 21:13
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Wipfmetz posted:The difference of 1870 :: 1940 has to be less noticeable than the difference of "Before Fire" :: "After Fire". Agricultural/Industrial society may just turn out to be a bubble that's going to burst any day now.
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Jan 27, 2016 21:18
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OwlFancier posted:I mean just off the top of my head the internet and smartphones have pretty massively influenced how life works in my lifetime. My entire job and the company I work for would be impossible without them. That's not coming back. I think you could probably make a decent case that the level of scientific discovery has slowed down significantly in the last 50 years, because that was an area where there really was a lot of low-hanging fruit that we had to knock out in the first couple centuries of work. There's only so many Maxwell Equations or DNA or Germ-Theory-Of-Disease-level discoveries to be made on earth, and we've probably hit most of them. But there's a fairly significant difference between that and technological innovation.
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Jan 28, 2016 03:53
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Wipfmetz posted:The difference of 1870 :: 1940 has to be less noticeable than the difference of "Before Fire" :: "After Fire". I think that's the point; the industrial age changed people's ways of life as dramatically as the transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture, and the computer age most certainly has not. If human civilization makes it another 1000 years I think the present will be seen as part of the industrial revolution.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:19
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Social and biological evolution could converge to create an electronic world mind. Something like Helios from Deus Ex.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:23
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Significant discoveries in fields like cosmology, astronomy, and physics don't necessarily positively impact Joe Sixpack in the short term so they aren't as noticeable to the public at large but there's huge progress being made in those fields. I doubt very many people outside of physicists cared about relativity in 1916 but in 2016 your car GPS has to adjust for its effects to function.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:28
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Also, as an addendum to that: remember when people used just not know things? Like, you'd stop and wonder for a moment about some trivial matter, and then just give up and never find out what the answer was? Remember when that was a thing people did? Yeah it's useful to make the distinction between scientific discovery vs technological application of it vs impact on daily life. There's a tendency to look at technology and how it affects us and use that as a measure of scientific advancement but that's arbitrary. Your basic needs can be fulfilled with less time invested but whether that curve will approach zero or not, has no bearing on scientific advancement. Right now the application of technology is happening in factories, warehouses, mines etc. so a lot of people don't experience it. The most important discoveries are probably in genetics, medical sciences and materials which probably won't result in a shiny new gadget you can put in your home.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:30
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Potential BFF posted:Significant discoveries in fields like cosmology, astronomy, and physics don't necessarily positively impact Joe Sixpack in the short term so they aren't as noticeable to the public at large but there's huge progress being made in those fields. I doubt very many people outside of physicists cared about relativity in 1916 but in 2016 your car GPS has to adjust for its effects to function. Related to Your Car's GPS: most of the big life-changing developments of the 20th century are a direct result of public investment in research, development and infrastructure, much like the aformentioned medical advances that are comin' down the pike. We've got significant developments in energy, medicine, and materials, but they're not going to have the massive change to people's lives without public investment and making it accessible. That GPS wouldn't do poo poo without big government hurling money into space. I'm thinking if we tried building society "on purpose in any way" rather than doing everything the dumbest loving way possible, increased automation producing more leisure time rather than just putting people out of work, increased development of transit infrastructure, increased investment in getting off fossil fuels and building solar/wind, and why not, fusion would have a pretty big impact in our daily lives and our averting catastrophe. So yeah that decline you're sensing is privatization basically. ReadyToHuman fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 04:48
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ReadyToHuman posted:increased automation producing more leisure time rather than just putting people out of work, The only difference here is the amount of unemployment benefits.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:53
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computer parts posted:The only difference here is the amount of unemployment benefits. Or, employment not being compulsory for survival, since people are less necessary to do the work of maintaining society. I don't know just spitballing here.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:55
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That NASA exists mostly due to competition with the Soviets and GPS exists mostly as a military tool is a pretty sad indictment of society as a whole but them's the breaks I guess. I guess one facet of the article I agree with is that the only piece of technology that can save us has already been invented, the guillotine.
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Jan 28, 2016 05:13
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Well, that probably has something to do with it being much easier to create the very basics of a steam engine than a fusion reactor. After the low-hanging fruits have been picked by random people, and then studied by physicists, physicists now have to develop the tools to pick those fruits themselves because we're now operating on a level of complexity and a scale which simply can't be compared to a machine that could probably be fixed by whacking it with a hammer. In that sense, physics is more useful because it's the only tool we have. I think that it is more due to physicists retreating into studying more and more oddball stuff which is further and further away from normal conditions on earth. Physics actually abhors complexity and a lot of physicists bend over backwards to study the simplest physical systems so they can approach problems from a bottom-up perspective. This explains physicists' fascination with stuff like the Higgs Boson, a supposedly very important fundamental particle which governs everything but 99.99% of science doesn't really need to explain how things work. It's navel-gazing. A Buttery Pastry posted:Also, as I pointed out, there was a full century from theory to commercially viable machine. I'm not intimately familiar with the history of the steam engine, but from reading wikipedia, the first commercially sucessful steam engine predates the development of the systematic theory of thermodynamics which explains how it works. This is not the example you want to trot out when trying to point out the lag between fundamental physics advances and technology. A Buttery Pastry posted:And along the way develop a bunch of new or improved poo poo because the old poo poo isn't good enough, which might then have applications in other fields. From what I gather, that is precisely what happens when people try to expand our knowledge, they're forced to create practical poo poo too because that's the only way they can actually measure anything, or make particles do what they want them to do. Yeah, this is true, but the benefits of this I think is often overstated. A lot of the specialized instrumentation isn't developed because it really isn't needed by society. Some physicists spend their entire careers building refrigerators to cool things down to temperatures which are small fractions of a Kelvin so that they can study what happens at such low temperatures. Turns out that normal people on Earth at about room temperature don't really care about what happens at milli-Kelvin temperatures, and they don't want to pay for the cost of the refrigeration. Potential BFF posted:Significant discoveries in fields like cosmology, astronomy, and physics don't necessarily positively impact Joe Sixpack in the short term so they aren't as noticeable to the public at large but there's huge progress being made in those fields. I doubt very many people outside of physicists cared about relativity in 1916 but in 2016 your car GPS has to adjust for its effects to function. Providing like a one part in a million correction or whatever (I've heard that the correction due to special relativity and the correction due to general relativity have opposite signs and thus partially cancel lol) to GPS calculations of position is the only real application of relativity that I have ever heard trotted out. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 05:38
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silence_kit posted:I think that it is more due to physicists retreating into studying more and more oddball stuff which is further and further away from normal conditions on earth. Your ability to make this post is the direct result of navel-gazing oddball physics research far away from normal conditions on earth, and to that extent I agree that perhaps it is to be avoided.
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Jan 28, 2016 05:58
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McDowell posted:Social and biological evolution could converge to create an electronic world mind. Something like Helios from Deus Ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Darwinism  All of our states and nations and tribes and races are naught but vast cellular automata wrought large. I hope we never have to face a single monolithic intelligence, systems can rarely escape that kind of steady state. Then we would certainly face the stagnation feared by the OP.
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Jan 28, 2016 06:17
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Only a retard thinks that physicists are only doing particle physics and astrophysics.
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Jan 28, 2016 06:21
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Only a retard thinks that physicists are only doing particle physics and astrophysics. Particle physics and astrophysics are "high physics" though, and are more prestigious than the more practical fields like condensed matter physics.
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Jan 28, 2016 06:28
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silence_kit posted:Particle physics and astrophysics are "high physics" though, and are more prestigious than the more practical fields like condensed matter physics. So much so that the Nobel Prizes in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014 all went to discoveries like graphene, CCD cameras, and blue LEDs.
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Jan 28, 2016 06:48
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silence_kit posted:Particle physics and astrophysics are "high physics" though, and are more prestigious than the more practical fields like condensed matter physics. Correction, they think of themselves as more prestigious.
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Jan 28, 2016 06:59
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The premises of this thread might as well have been; quote:If I look at the way we flush a toilet, I've noticed little real visible progress in the past half century. Since I now decide to make this my point of reference and will ignore poo poo I take for granted, I deem were are utterly hosed. It feels like some terrible pessimistic clickbait, honestly. To the guy who's 30 years old and "didn't see much change in his life", did you never play video games or something? Or listen to music? Did you not notice anything about the screens you're looking at? Never read up on medical progress? Like gently caress, even how far prosthetics have progressed is mind loving blowing. How about cars? Have you stepped into a newer car the past 20 years? Or even the past 5 years? What are your measuring points for progress? Batham fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 09:10
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Popular Thug Drink posted:But on the other hand, cheap shipping has created a global market for manufacturing labor and whoops, there goes the wage-earning basis of the first world middle class! Sounds like progress to me.
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Jan 28, 2016 09:19
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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Sequencing a human genome cost several billion dollars when I entered the workforce. Today I bought a CRISPR-Cas9 kit from an off the shelf supplier for under a grand, after working in synthetic biologics for several years. Sorry your cell phone apps aren't transforming human society, but there is no loving way we're running into a development gap right now. It's just not the advances that we thought we were going to have. Edit: poo poo I 3d print things out of stainless steel for work on a weekly basis and two thirds of the technologies I use at work didn't exist when a decade ago. If anything's holding us back, it's finance coming up with new and unique ways to extract fees from a productive economy using technological advancements like software models/AI, NLP, and global internet surveillance. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 10:08
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This question is like a bunch of Australopithecenes (or Homo habilis if you don't buy that A. africanus was a toolmaker) sitting around arguing that it's been 1.5 million years since they invented the Oldowan Industry, and most likely sharp stick, so obviously they're in an age of technological decline. From their vantage point it may seem like it, technology has been stable for a long time. But they just can't foresee the Acheulean Industry, Mousterian Industry, Mossel Bay Industry, Clovis Complex, domestication, irrigation infrastructure, metallurgy and space flight with their current knowledge. And this is only if you accept the premise that technology has been standing still since the 1960s, which as numerous posters have pointed out, is really not the case. The advances in medical technology alone have been immense. Also, there are very, very few examples of technological decline in human history. Standstills sure, but actual decline is extremely rare. So no, I would not say we're in an age of technological decline.
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Jan 28, 2016 12:28
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The title of this thread and most of the conversation does not match the argument in the OP. We are unquestionably not heading for "technological decline", and many aspects of life are clearly improved in the past few decades due to the inventions of the internet and smartphones and GPS, etc. The real question is whether any of these new technologies are sustainable economic powerhouses that can match the long-term and short-term growth from earlier technological progress. Clearly, the internet allows for greater economic activity, but I think it's easy to make the case that it doesn't have nearly as dramatic an effect as the proliferation of electricity in the 19th century or widespread adoption of the combustion engine. Basically, the global economy has been injected with nitro boosters periodically over the past 150 years, and people now think that is the natural speed. However, as far as we can tell, there are no more boosters left. And there was a shitload of inequality and poverty and war during the good times, so who the hell knows how bad it could get now that the good times might be winding down. All that said, I think that a breakthrough in clean energy and/or industrical scale energy storage has the potential to be another booster that could keep the global economy humming for a few decades (which would obviously also have positive effects on the environmental problems we're facing), so I'm cautiously hopeful.
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Jan 28, 2016 13:29
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Squalid posted:All of our states and nations and tribes and races are naught but vast cellular automata wrought large.  Arguably the planetary intelligence I am talking about would be the next step in secular democracy - every human would be an active citizen connected to each other by the computer in their pocket. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve quality of life.As for 'navel gazing' - I don't think getting a higher resolution model of how energy = matter is useless information. We still have no idea how matter affects spacetime to produce gravity.
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Jan 28, 2016 13:32
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Doctor Spaceman posted:So much so that the Nobel Prizes in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014 all went to discoveries like graphene, CCD cameras, and blue LEDs. Most of the time discoveries in condensed matter physics have to actually matter to society to earn a Nobel. And in a lot of those cases, those contributions weren't fundamental physics advances, they were more like chemistry/material science advances, like with Charles Kao proposing the idea for fiber optics by recognizing that if you were to make glass very pure, it could be very transparent to infrared light. Or Shuji Nakamura perfecting the metamorphic epitaxial crystal growth of gallium nitride to enable efficient blue light-emitting diodes. I'm sure those in high physics scoffed and said that those scientists discovered no new physics when those awards were announced.
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Jan 28, 2016 17:12
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Inferior Third Season posted:The real question is whether any of these new technologies are sustainable economic powerhouses that can match the long-term and short-term growth from earlier technological progress. Clearly, the internet allows for greater economic activity, but I think it's easy to make the case that it doesn't have nearly as dramatic an effect as the proliferation of electricity in the 19th century or widespread adoption of the combustion engine. The huge caveat here that you're not mentioning is that proliferation of those technologies are not universal. It's really hard to get a grasp on the effects of the internet when a decade ago, most of China didn't have it.
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Jan 28, 2016 17:51
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I'm 40 years old, and came of age before the Internet was really a thing. I didn't send my first email until I was a freshman in college, and that was over what today seems like Paleolithic university intranet. It would be difficult to overstate how much the Internet has changed life. The smart phone is another enormous development whose influence on social interaction hasn't even fully shaken out yet.
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Jan 28, 2016 18:33
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"There's hardly been any meaningful innovation in the last few decades," they said, speaking to an instantly-updating discussion forum frequented by thousands of people across the globe.TheImmigrant posted:I'm 40 years old, and came of age before the Internet was really a thing. I didn't send my first email until I was a freshman in college, and that was over what today seems like Paleolithic university intranet. It would be difficult to overstate how much the Internet has changed life. The smart phone is another enormous development whose influence on social interaction hasn't even fully shaken out yet. We live in a world where even refugees have access to a constantly-updating corpus of globally accessible knowledge that they use to find services, where they can instantly communicate with friends and relatives across the entire planet at all times. There also seems to be a double standard with regards to what innovation is considered revolutionary vs incremental. Could people get around and carry their goods before cars? Sure, via horses, trains, and boats. Cars just made it easier and faster. See? Merely incremental innovation! Cicero fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 18:57
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Yeah, in 1995, I met and dated a German foreign-exchange student in my city in the Midwest. She went home at the end of 1995, and I followed her out to Germany a few months later to live with her. In the meantime, we wrote each other letters (email for the general public was in its infancy, and international calls were still expensive). Snail-mail letters. I doubt any of the most active posters on SA have written more than a dozen snail-mail letters in their lives. No technological development in my lifetime even comes close to the change the Internet has brought about. I was a tech-savvy kid in the 80s, which at the time meant that I knew how to program BASIC code. I couldn't have imagined the poo poo I would see in the second half of the 90s.
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Jan 28, 2016 19:26
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I would think GPS alone has been a massive change in the way people do things.
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Jan 28, 2016 19:33
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computer parts posted:I would think GPS alone has been a massive change in the way people do things.
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Jan 28, 2016 19:50
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^^^ Five orders of magnitude better accuracy or not, GPS is just an incremental improvement over using a sextant  I went back to scan over the article in case I missed a major point but nope, still seems pretty dumb. Most of the issues have been mentioned already, but I'll try to recap:
But if all these incremental upgrades are put together, you get things like massively cheaper air travel, and think the accessibility makes an enormous difference. For a week's salary I can go anywhere in the world tomorrow, should I so desire. Because of modern telecommunications, I could then be working from the beach in Thailand tomorrow without anyone realizing or caring. While sitting on the beach, I could start a new business and sell it for billions to Facebook, then fly home and have the apartment cleaned and some food cooked by tapping a button on my phone. Yes, exactly like 1940 because they had cars and planes too.
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Jan 28, 2016 19:58
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A Buttery Pastry posted:GPS is for people with no sense of direction.
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Jan 28, 2016 20:09
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Ze Pollack posted:We have enough of a handle on genetics at this point that we can do some truly amazing things- it's just a matter of having the time and patience to try every one of several million keys in every one of several million locks. What "amazing things" are you referring to? It's true that we've made some amazing progress in our knowledge of genetics/genomics and the technology used for sequencing and analyzing the resulting data, but turning that into some technological progress that will actually have a noticeable affect on a significant portion of the population is still very far in the future (if it will happen at all). We'll probably be able to address diseases/conditions that have some straight-forward genetic cause, but most serious ailments that people experience (like cancer) are so complex that we aren't even close to being able to address them. Basically, the huge strides we've made have enabled us to understand just how difficult it'll be to actually make practical use of all this new data. That being said, we might be able to do some cool stuff with things like GMOs, but usually when people say things like you said they're referring to human-related stuff like somehow giving people resistance to diseases before they're born. It's really a shame that so many smart people go into finance, because people with a strong background in areas like statistics are direly needed in fields like biology.
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Jan 28, 2016 20:29
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Genetically modified e coli produce human insulin for diabetics.
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Jan 28, 2016 20:34
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Gene editing shows promise in treating muscular dystrophy.
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Jan 28, 2016 20:35
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silence_kit posted:Most of the time discoveries in condensed matter physics have to actually matter to society to earn a Nobel. And in a lot of those cases, those contributions weren't fundamental physics advances, they were more like chemistry/material science advances, like with Charles Kao proposing the idea for fiber optics by recognizing that if you were to make glass very pure, it could be very transparent to infrared light. Or Shuji Nakamura perfecting the metamorphic epitaxial crystal growth of gallium nitride to enable efficient blue light-emitting diodes. I'm sure those in high physics scoffed and said that those scientists discovered no new physics when those awards were announced. If you think "high physics" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) scoffs at advances in other disciplines, then surely you can find a high physicist expressing that opinion. I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about, though- physicists all over the world are working on groundbreaking research in nanotechnology, materials science, biophysics, and optics.
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Jan 28, 2016 20:47
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